Local Gestures

In 1970, Joann Kealiinohomoku (who just passed away in December) caused somewhat of a stir when she published her seminal essay “An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance.” Hopefully, that ballet is a form of ethnic dance is now more obvious than it is controversial.

​As such, we could say that with her version of Swan Lake, South African choreographer Dada Masilo is making two ethnic dances – ballet and African dance – meet. (There is no such thing as “African dance”, Kealiinohomoku would say, rightfully.) Furthermore, Masilo queers ballet by having Siegfried fall for a male black swan rather than Odette, whom he is set to marry by his parents. As such, her Swan Lake is explicitly about the compulsory heterosexuality that permeates both ballet (countless gay dancers constantly having to act straight, except for that bisexual orgy in Kader Belarbi’s La Bête et la Belle) and life in general.

After having a quick run-through of your typical ballet (like Dave St-Pierre running through the whole of La Pornographie des Âmes in the first tableau of the show), a dozen dancers plunge into their own version of Swan Lake; for they do not dance like they did in the summary. Thanks to African dance, the women are more vivacious, shaking their hips and stomping their feet; and, thanks to queering, the men are lighter. When they dance together, their movements are the same, ungendered. Similarly, all dancers sport white tutus. By toying with the conventions of classical dance, Swan Lake plays like a parody of ballet.

Despite these subversions, the show otherwise remains quite conventional. All of its politics are in its content and none are in its form. We are inevitably reminded of the poverty of dance as a medium for storytelling. What storytelling and ballet have in common is that they are mere rearrangements of the same elements. Since we already know this story, as we do all stories, we are free to wander off and come back to it without ever having missed anything.

As a light nerd, I was also disappointed with Suzette Le Sueur’s permanent blanket lighting provided by twelve equally distant spots at the front of the stage.

The ballet ends with a collective suicide (the result of the toxicity of homophobia, I assume), which I presume is meant to be emotional since it is set to Arvo Pärt’s “Spiegel im Spiegel.” There’s no reason to dance to Arvo Pärt. What more could there possibly be to add? What remains is the stellar performance of the dancers of the Dance Factory Johannesburg.

When the city of Montreal advised its population not to drink tap water because it might be unsafe, a friend living in Turkey wrote on Facebook, “We don't drink tap water here at all. We order big fat 19 liter jugs of water that are delivered by men who carry six of them at once on their scooters while talking on their cell phones with no helmet on. True story!” One of her friends replied, “In Guatemala, we get water from the guy that delivers them by foot, 3 at a time up the hill. Guatemalans are badass! You can also get them from the tuk-tuk guy if you live in a remote area, by remote I mean on the other side of the street.” Yet another person chimed in: “It's exactly the same in India.”

The first comment had been, “Yep, water is seriously taken for granted in Canada.” And maybe that’s the problem with beauty. It’s what we take for granted. It’s not less present. It’s just less noticeable. When one of the seven dancers in Robyn Orlin’s Beauty Remained for Just a Moment Then Returned Gently to her Starting Position… asks, “God, have you found your own beauty?”, the question could be understood in at least two ways. It could be about God perceiving Himself as beautiful, which would not be an irrelevant question if one believes that Man was made in God’s image. It could also be about beauty being not perceived by the mind, but produced by it. We rarely talk about it, but it’s not always human beings that fail nature; sometimes it’s life that fails us. Sometimes there is no sun, literal or otherwise, and we must shine a light of our own and pretend. That’s probably when human beings are most beautiful; when they refuse to submit to the arbitrary ways of the universe. This is but one of the many things we accomplish with art. We compensate. We make up for the lacks of the world. A performer jumps up and down and asks, “Sun, can you jump like this?” It is often hard not to feel small in the face of the cosmos. But what if we didn’t think in terms of size or quantity or time, but in terms of qualities? No, the sun cannot jump like this. Beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder. It is also in the body of the mover.May 23 & 24 at 8pmMonument-National – Salle Ludger-Duvernaywww.fta.qc.ca514.844.3822 / 1.866.984.3822Tickets: 43-48$ / 30 years old and under: 38-43$